Developer Diaries

Flatout

Building tracks, polishing cars, and bug-hunting missions are the topics of this month's diary.

Hello! Welcome back to our show describing what it's like to stand in the middle of the creative, bubbling chaos of the game development process. FlatOut is the game here and I expect(?!) you have heard of it already. Last time I gave you a brief glimpse into car-creation process. Now it's time to look at the surroundings you'll drive in.

Track artists begin by brainstorming an interesting race track profile by sketching it on the paper, including some of the defining features such as forest areas, ponds, and hills. If the sketch doesn't cause any complaints, respective track artists begin modeling the track. No frills there, only good old-fashioned manual labor. Next in the texturing process comes a neat trick: big, cover-all base textures -- "colormaps," as we call them. They are painted with all the respective ground colors defining the road surfaces, sandy areas, asphalt etc. On top of that go the small detail maps. The result? Magnificent, smooth color transitions between landscape features without unexpected and abrupt texture changes or seams.

At this point, the basic track makes its way to the current build of the game. Here, other team members can test it and give useful pointers and opinions to whoever is working on it. In essence, it's just driven around as hard as possible while still staying on the marked track. After a short while a picture forms: on this bend it's easy to overshoot; this jump here covers the following turn from view until it's too late; and so forth. Basically, we look at all the quirks and surprises of the track design so it can be taken into account when placing objects and other features later on.

A track sketch becomes a reality.

After creating the basic groundwork, comes the environment. On forest-based tracks, several thousand trees and bushes are placed and lush grass thrown all over. For the next task, a separate team has created a massive library of objects ready to go into game. They put all textures and physics parameters in place: audience stands, race controller towers, ad stands, fences, and all the other stuff. Everything is easily replaced and updated to the latest version if any changes occur.

From there on, it's polishing and bug hunting. Some changes, according to observations on the gameplay, are repeated until everyone's happy. Mind you, this is a very broad description of track creation. Telling you all the details would require a column several times longer than this, and it could get boring.

Next time I'll try to cover the most notable and talked-about aspect of FlatOut in detail -- the physics!